Eunice Ross. Phebe Ann Boston. Sarah Roberts. Sarah Parker Remond. Charlotte Forten Grimké. Joanna Turpin Howard. These six African American women, among others, played an integral role in the fight to desegregate public schools in antebellum Massachusetts. They authored anti-discrimination petitions, they helped to organize boycotts, and they wrote missives against racial prejudice. As this school desegregation campaign grew, so too did an activist network that bound together African American women, men, and children as well as their allies from Salem to Nantucket to Boston.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

Public Program The Devil and the Crown4 November 2017.Saturday, 11:00AM - 5:30PMFor more information about this event please contact Jim Hollister at 978-318-7829 or jim_hollister@nps.govTwo hundred fifty years ago, the winds of change began to blow. The French and Indian War was ...

Two hundred fifty years ago, the winds of change began to blow. The French and Indian War was over and now the Crown looked for sources to help pay the bill. The Stamp Act, a new tax directly applied to the colonies on legal documents, newspapers and more, would meet stiff resistance in the colonies, causing protest and eventual repeal. Two years later, an alternative series of acts were created in the form of the Townshend Duties. Like the Stamp Act before, urban communities in places like Boston would quickly coalesce and voice their opposition and protest Royal authority.

Protest often took different forms. Those with property, the “better sorts,” would meet , discuss and draft petitions and organize boycotts. Meanwhile, those of the laboring class, the “lower sorts,” who did not own enough property to vote, would voice their disapproval in the street and sometimes engage in mob violence. Each group had their own particular grievances with the Crown and ways to protest.

On Saturday, November 4, experience revolutionary politics “indoors” and “out-of-doors” as it would have happened 250 years ago. Participate in a live reenactment at Faneuil Hall of a Boston town meeting which took place in October 1767. Join in the discussion as local citizens argue over whether or not to stop importing British goods. Following the town meeting, join a rowdy procession of laboring-class Bostonians of 1767 from Faneuil Hall to the Old State House, as they express their disapproval of British trade policies in a rather colorful and intimidating way.

Come try your luck as a young apprentice in this colonial marketplace game. Whether you buy, barter, or smuggle, the goal's the same: bring all your goods back to your employer and get promoted! This drop in program is best for ages 6-10, Faneuil Hall, Education Space, basement.

1:00 - 4:30 pm:“Talk of the Town” - meet reenactors portraying Bostonians of different social classes in Samuel Adams Park, directly in front of Faneuil Hall, and learn about why they are protesting the new laws.

Beginning in 1695, Scots at home and abroad flocked to support their country's nascent colony on the Darien isthmus in Panama. This paper argues that Scots’ enthusiasm for the Darien project stemmed not from national impulses, but from a desire to define their status in a liberal, Protestant British Atlantic World alongside their colonial American allies and patrons.

To RSVP: email seminars@masshist.org or call (617) 646-0579. Please note that unlike other sessions in the series, this session begins at 5:30 pm.

This project examines conflicts over liberty poles in the 1790s. Liberty poles offered grassroots partisans a tangible symbol through which to channel debates about political participation, popular sovereignty, and dissent under the new Constitution.

Public Program, Author Talk, Conversation The Weeping Angel: Letter and Poems from World War I France8 November 2017.Wednesday, 6:00PM - 7:00PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm.Mary Kelley, editor, and Christopher Capozzola, MIT$10 registration fee per person. (No Charge for MHS Members or Fellows)Army recruitment posters proclaimed “Join up and be in France in 60 days.” Young high ...

Army recruitment posters proclaimed “Join up and be in France in 60 days.” Young high school graduate Hubert Kelley answered the call. Working as a soldier on the railroads in France during World War I, he found his vocation as a poet and writer through vivid letters to family. Kelley will describe her efforts to retrace the forgotten history of a perceptive observer of the war’s destruction, and Capozzola will comment on the letters’ contribution to new historical understandings that have emerged during the war’s centennial.

When the National Park Service wanted to create a federal park on Cape Cod, residents worried about what would happen to their homes, communities, and coastal traditions. This paper examines how citizens articulated their concerns, and how these responses helped the NPS and Senators John F. Kennedy and Leverett Saltonstall to create a new acquisition and land management policy that would then be applied to other living landscapes.

Accused regicide and former pastor of Salem, Massachusetts, Hugh Peter was the target of colorful satirical ballads and mock-sermons in the mid-seventeenth century. This presentation will explore the ways Royalists attacked Peter as a way of mocking the culture of puritanism, expressing anxieties about the very existence of puritan colonies.

Public Program, Author Talk Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty16 November 2017.Thursday, 6:00PM - 7:00PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm.John Boles, Rice University$10 registration fee per person. (No Charge for MHS Members or Fellows)Jefferson challenges us more thoroughly than any other Founder; he was at once the most idealistic, ...

Jefferson challenges us more thoroughly than any other Founder; he was at once the most idealistic, contradictory, and quintessentially American of them all. This biography does not ignore aspects of Jefferson that trouble us today but strives to see him in full and understand him amid the sweeping upheaval of his times. From his inspiring defenses of political and religious liberty to his heterodox abridgment of Christian belief, this book explores Jefferson’s expansive intellectual life and the profound impact of his ideas on the world.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

Public Program, Author Talk Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian20 November 2017.Monday, 6:00PM - 7:00PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm.Richard Aldous, Bard College in conversation with Fredrik Logevall, Harvard University$10 registration fee per person. (No Charge for MHS Members or Fellows)Drawing on oral histories, rarely seen archival documents, and the official Schlesinger papers, this ...

Drawing on oral histories, rarely seen archival documents, and the official Schlesinger papers, this biography crafts an invaluable portrait of a brilliant and controversial historian who framed America’s rise to global empire. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the architect of John F. Kennedy’s legacy, redefined the art of presidential biography. A Thousand Days, his best selling record of the Kennedy administration, remains immensely influential and cemented his place as one of the nation’s greatest political image makers.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

Public Program, Author Talk, Conversation The New Annotated African American Folktales27 November 2017.Monday, 6:00PM - 7:00PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm.Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University, and Maria Tatar, Harvard University$10 registration fee per person. (No Charge for MHS Members or Fellows)This new publication presents nearly 150 African American stories, among them familiar Brer Rabbit ...

This new publication presents nearly 150 African American stories, among them familiar Brer Rabbit classics, but also stories like “The Talking Skull” and “Witches Who Ride,” as well as out-of-print tales from the 1890s’ Southern Workman. Arguing for the value of these stories as part of a sophisticated, complex, and heterogeneous cultural heritage, Gates and Tatar show how these stories deserve a place alongside the classic works of African American literature and American literature more broadly.

This panel considers volunteerism as sponsored by ethnic and service organizations. Both essays challenge our notions of “belonging” in a civil society, including our understandings of assimilation, activism, and protest. Shin’s paper is “Masons, Scouts, and Legionnaires: Voluntary Associations and the Making of Chinese American Civil Society, 1864-1945.” Staysniak’s essay is “Poverty Warriors, Service Learners, and a Nationwide Movement: Youth Volunteer Service, 1964-1973.”

Public Program, Author Talk Revolution Song30 November 2017.Thursday, 6:00PM - 7:00PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm.Russell Shorto, New York Times Magazine$10 registration fee per person. (No Charge for MHS Members or Fellows)With America’s founding principles being debated today as never before, Shorto looks back to ...

With America’s founding principles being debated today as never before, Shorto looks back to the era in which those principles were forged. Drawing on new sources, he weaves the lives of six people into a seamless narrative that casts fresh light on the range of experience in colonial America on the cusp of revolution. While some of the protagonists play major roles, others struggle no less valiantly. Through these lives we understand that the Revolution was, indeed, fought over the meaning of individual freedom.

Who decides what should be remembered in public spaces? Is removing a monument the equivalent of erasing history, or should monuments change along with their communities? Join MHS in exploring how monuments and memorials can help students understand history, historical memory, and how national symbols play a critical role in articulating culture and identity. We will discuss examples of monuments and memorials ranging from early American history to the Holocaust, and will engage with the current controversy over the role of Confederate monuments and memorials in communities across the US.

This program is open to all K-12 educators. Teachers can earn 22.5 PDPs or one graduate credit (for an additional fee).

In this presentation and virtual exhibit, Professor Andrew Robichaud and students from Boston University will present more than twenty rare artifacts and documents from the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society. From prison and asylum reform, to education and temperance, to women’s rights and abolitionism, this presentation will explore many dimensions of reform in Boston. How did Boston reformers understand their changing world, and how did they understand social change and improvement?

Early American History Seminar Petitions and the Cry of Sedition5 December 2017.Tuesday, 5:15PM - 7:30PMAdrian C. Weimer, Providence CollegeComment: Walter Woodward, University of ConnecticutIn the political upheavals of the early Restoration a remarkable number of Massachusetts men and ...

In the political upheavals of the early Restoration a remarkable number of Massachusetts men and women expressed keen dissatisfaction with the monarchy or General Court, leading to trials over seditious speech. The rich theological language in the petitions and feisty curses in the trial records offer an unrivaled glimpse into the significance of religion for the mobilization of local political communities in this tumultuous era.

This presentation examines the environmental history and cultural geography of the North Atlantic shore during the Age of Exploration. How, it asks, did early modern coastal imaginaries shape the contours of cultural contact and exchange among Native Americans and Europeans? And how did those imaginaries shape the ways both groups interacted with coastal spaces in more material ways? A closer look at the ways coasts blurred the bounds of natural knowledge, conventions of conduct, and even the distinction between good and evil, may help us write uncertainty into an otherwise linear narrative of human progress, and, by extension, global expansion.

Member Event, Special Event MHS Fellows and Members Holiday Party6 December 2017.Wednesday, 6:00PM - 8:00PMThis event is open only to MHS Fellows and MembersMHS Fellows and Members are invited to the Society’s annual holiday party. Enjoy an evening of ...

MHS Fellows and Members are invited to the Society’s annual holiday party. Enjoy an evening of holiday cheer, celebrate the season, and wish a happy retirement to MHS President Emeritus Dennis Fiori. Holiday cocktail attire requested. RSVP by 1 December.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

When Pennsylvania settlers used plants to treat illnesses, they used a type of knowledge that Anderson calls “lived botany.” This term reveals that colonists developed ways of interpreting their landscapes that simultaneously partook of and deviated from the norms of eighteenth-century natural history. Domestic spaces became sites where colonists created information about the natural world, allowing them to feel secure in the new environments where they claimed dominion.

Public Program, Author Talk The Slave's Cause13 December 2017.Wednesday, 6:00PM - 7:00PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm.Manisha Sinha, University of ConnecticutAbolitionists are often portrayed as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial ...

Abolitionists are often portrayed as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. This book broadens the chronology of abolition beyond the antebellum period as well as recasts it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism to anti-imperialism. This new history sets the abolition movement in a transnational context and illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave’s cause to the struggle to redefine democracy and human rights across the globe.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

Drawn from McElya’s larger book project, this essay examines the centrality of the Miss America pageant, its local networks, and individual contestants to the rise of activist conservative women and the New Right in the 1960s and 1970s. It analyzes the celebration, power, and political effects of normative beauty, steeped in heterosexual gender norms and white supremacy, and argues for the transformative effect of putting diverse women’s voices at the center of political history and inquiry.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

Settlers and travelers moving westward in the early republic encountered the myriad Indian mounds scattered along the American frontier. These sundry earthworks furnished ample grist for various projects: frontier infrastructure, literary nationalism, the national historical narrative, and—as this talk explores—the emergence of American archives.

Building Closed MHS Closed4 January 2018.Thursday, all dayDue to the severe weather forecast, the MHS is CLOSED on Thursday, 4 January. If you plan to visit ...

Due to the severe weather forecast, the MHS is CLOSED on Thursday, 4 January. If you plan to visit the building on Friday, 5 January, please check our website that morning to see if the building is open.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

In 1919, state engineers proposed solving Boston’s water supply crisis by damming the Swift River, flooding a western Massachusetts valley and evicting 2,500 people. The contentious six-year debate that followed does not fit the standard story of urban conservationists versus rural peoples, as many valley residents defined themselves as rural and conservationist, and thus offers scholars a chance to see fresh nuances in early twentieth-century land management, rural life, and urban development.

"Come, then, one and all, and learn to know yourselves." With these words, a traveling phrenologist advertised his lecture to the public. Proponents of phrenology — a controversial, influential science — believed that the shape of one’s cranium revealed one’s character. This talk explores the world of phrenological lecture-demonstrations and the circulation of materialist ideas about the self.

James Madison’s Notes on the 1787 Constitutional Convention have acquired nearly unquestioned authority as the description of the U.S. Constitution’s creation. No document provides a more complete record of the deliberations in Philadelphia. But how reliable is this account? In an unprecedented investigation Mary Sarah Bilder reveals that Madison revised the Notes to a far greater extent than previously recognized. Madison’s Hand offers a biography of a document that, over two centuries, developed a life and character all its own.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

After the Patent Act of 1790, patents played an important social and political role in the formation of American nationhood and citizenship. Part of a larger book project, this paper demonstrates how nineteenth-century American women mobilized patents granted to women as justification for civil rights claims. It identifies the creation of the “woman inventor” as a cultural trope and political weapon of resistance.

Public Program, Conversation Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize Award & Reception25 January 2018.Thursday, 6:00PM - 7:30PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30.Tamara Plakins Thornton, University at Buffalo, and Catherine Allgor, MHSPlease join us for a special evening in which Tamara Plakins Thornton will receive the 2017 Gomes ...

Please join us for a special evening in which Tamara Plakins Thornton will receive the 2017 Gomes Prize for Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a 19th-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life. Thornton will join MHS President and Dolley Madison biographer Catherine Allgor in a conversation about why historians become biographers. How do they pull off that transformation? Thornton and Allgor will explore what drew them to the life of a single individual after they had published “standard” historical monographs. They will address the sorts of novel challenges they faced as both scholars and writers— and the new intellectual pleasures they encountered.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

Public Program, Conversation Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film29 January 2018.Monday, 6:00PM - 7:30PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm.Martha McNamara, Wellesley College, and Karan Sheldon, Northeast Historic Film$10 per person fee (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members or EBT cardholders).The term “amateur film” conjures visions of shaky, out-of-focus images depicting family ...

The term “amateur film” conjures visions of shaky, out-of-focus images depicting family vacations and kids’ birthday parties, but early twentieth-century amateur filmmaking produced irreplaceable records of people’s lives and beloved places. This volume of essays, interprets a wide variety of visually expressive amateur films made in New England. Martha McNamara and Karan Sheldon will highlight three examples: the comedies of landscape architect Sidney N. Shurcliff, depictions of pastoral family life by Elizabeth Woodman Wright, and the chronicles of Anna B. Harris, an African American resident of Manchester, Vermont.

Between Prohibition and World War II, American law enforcement went from being seen as a brutal and incompetent political liability to a professional crime-fighting regime. This essay explores the dramatic shift in public perception by studying the changing practices of Depression-era morality policing in Boston and Los Angeles—specifically, the police enforcement of morals misdemeanors, including vagrancy, disorderly conduct, lewdness, and prostitution, which disproportionately targeted poor women on city streets.

This project focuses on women who worked as Indian doctresses and the clients who sought their care. The study strives to more fully integrate indigeneity into fields of study from which it is often absent, most notably labor history and the history of medicine.

Brown BagEqual School Rights: Black Girlhood and School Desegregation in Antebellum Massachusetts1 November 2017.Wednesday, 12:00PM - 1:00PMKabria Baumgartner, University of New Hampshire

Eunice Ross. Phebe Ann Boston. Sarah Roberts. Sarah Parker Remond. Charlotte Forten Grimké. Joanna Turpin Howard. These six African American women, among others, played an integral role in the fight to desegregate public schools in antebellum Massachusetts. They authored anti-discrimination petitions, they helped to organize boycotts, and they wrote missives against racial prejudice. As this school desegregation campaign grew, so too did an activist network that bound together African American women, men, and children as well as their allies from Salem to Nantucket to Boston.

MHS TourThe History and Collections of the MHS4 November 2017.Saturday, 10:00AM - 11:30AM

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

Public ProgramThe Devil and the Crown4 November 2017.Saturday, 11:00AM - 5:30PMFor more information about this event please contact Jim Hollister at 978-318-7829 or jim_hollister@nps.gov

Two hundred fifty years ago, the winds of change began to blow. The French and Indian War was over and now the Crown looked for sources to help pay the bill. The Stamp Act, a new tax directly applied to the colonies on legal documents, newspapers and more, would meet stiff resistance in the colonies, causing protest and eventual repeal. Two years later, an alternative series of acts were created in the form of the Townshend Duties. Like the Stamp Act before, urban communities in places like Boston would quickly coalesce and voice their opposition and protest Royal authority.

Protest often took different forms. Those with property, the “better sorts,” would meet , discuss and draft petitions and organize boycotts. Meanwhile, those of the laboring class, the “lower sorts,” who did not own enough property to vote, would voice their disapproval in the street and sometimes engage in mob violence. Each group had their own particular grievances with the Crown and ways to protest.

On Saturday, November 4, experience revolutionary politics “indoors” and “out-of-doors” as it would have happened 250 years ago. Participate in a live reenactment at Faneuil Hall of a Boston town meeting which took place in October 1767. Join in the discussion as local citizens argue over whether or not to stop importing British goods. Following the town meeting, join a rowdy procession of laboring-class Bostonians of 1767 from Faneuil Hall to the Old State House, as they express their disapproval of British trade policies in a rather colorful and intimidating way.

Come try your luck as a young apprentice in this colonial marketplace game. Whether you buy, barter, or smuggle, the goal's the same: bring all your goods back to your employer and get promoted! This drop in program is best for ages 6-10, Faneuil Hall, Education Space, basement.

1:00 - 4:30 pm:“Talk of the Town” - meet reenactors portraying Bostonians of different social classes in Samuel Adams Park, directly in front of Faneuil Hall, and learn about why they are protesting the new laws.

Early American History SeminarBritish Caledonia: English America and the Scottish Darien Project, 1675-17027 November 2017.Tuesday, 5:30PM - 7:45PMCraig Gallagher, Boston CollegeComment: Hannah Muller, Brandeis University

Beginning in 1695, Scots at home and abroad flocked to support their country's nascent colony on the Darien isthmus in Panama. This paper argues that Scots’ enthusiasm for the Darien project stemmed not from national impulses, but from a desire to define their status in a liberal, Protestant British Atlantic World alongside their colonial American allies and patrons.

To RSVP: email seminars@masshist.org or call (617) 646-0579. Please note that unlike other sessions in the series, this session begins at 5:30 pm.

Brown BagPolitics at the Poles: Liberty Poles and the Popular Struggle for the New Republic8 November 2017.Wednesday, 12:00PM - 1:00PMShira Lurie, University of Virginia

This project examines conflicts over liberty poles in the 1790s. Liberty poles offered grassroots partisans a tangible symbol through which to channel debates about political participation, popular sovereignty, and dissent under the new Constitution.

Public Program, Author Talk, ConversationThe Weeping Angel: Letter and Poems from World War I France8 November 2017.Wednesday, 6:00PM - 7:00PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm.Mary Kelley, editor, and Christopher Capozzola, MIT$10 registration fee per person. (No Charge for MHS Members or Fellows)

Army recruitment posters proclaimed “Join up and be in France in 60 days.” Young high school graduate Hubert Kelley answered the call. Working as a soldier on the railroads in France during World War I, he found his vocation as a poet and writer through vivid letters to family. Kelley will describe her efforts to retrace the forgotten history of a perceptive observer of the war’s destruction, and Capozzola will comment on the letters’ contribution to new historical understandings that have emerged during the war’s centennial.

When the National Park Service wanted to create a federal park on Cape Cod, residents worried about what would happen to their homes, communities, and coastal traditions. This paper examines how citizens articulated their concerns, and how these responses helped the NPS and Senators John F. Kennedy and Leverett Saltonstall to create a new acquisition and land management policy that would then be applied to other living landscapes.

Brown BagThe Roasting of Hugh Peter: Satire and Politics in Early America15 November 2017.Wednesday, 12:00PM - 1:00PMAdrian Weimer, Providence College

Accused regicide and former pastor of Salem, Massachusetts, Hugh Peter was the target of colorful satirical ballads and mock-sermons in the mid-seventeenth century. This presentation will explore the ways Royalists attacked Peter as a way of mocking the culture of puritanism, expressing anxieties about the very existence of puritan colonies.

Public Program, Author TalkJefferson: Architect of American Liberty16 November 2017.Thursday, 6:00PM - 7:00PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm.John Boles, Rice University$10 registration fee per person. (No Charge for MHS Members or Fellows)

Jefferson challenges us more thoroughly than any other Founder; he was at once the most idealistic, contradictory, and quintessentially American of them all. This biography does not ignore aspects of Jefferson that trouble us today but strives to see him in full and understand him amid the sweeping upheaval of his times. From his inspiring defenses of political and religious liberty to his heterodox abridgment of Christian belief, this book explores Jefferson’s expansive intellectual life and the profound impact of his ideas on the world.

MHS TourThe History and Collections of the MHS18 November 2017.Saturday, 10:00AM - 11:30AM

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

Public Program, Author TalkSchlesinger: The Imperial Historian20 November 2017.Monday, 6:00PM - 7:00PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm.Richard Aldous, Bard College in conversation with Fredrik Logevall, Harvard University$10 registration fee per person. (No Charge for MHS Members or Fellows)

Drawing on oral histories, rarely seen archival documents, and the official Schlesinger papers, this biography crafts an invaluable portrait of a brilliant and controversial historian who framed America’s rise to global empire. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the architect of John F. Kennedy’s legacy, redefined the art of presidential biography. A Thousand Days, his best selling record of the Kennedy administration, remains immensely influential and cemented his place as one of the nation’s greatest political image makers.

MHS TourThe History and Collections of the MHS25 November 2017.Saturday, 10:00AM - 11:30AM

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

Public Program, Author Talk, ConversationThe New Annotated African American Folktales27 November 2017.Monday, 6:00PM - 7:00PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm.Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University, and Maria Tatar, Harvard University$10 registration fee per person. (No Charge for MHS Members or Fellows)

Watch the recording of this event, embedded below:

This new publication presents nearly 150 African American stories, among them familiar Brer Rabbit classics, but also stories like “The Talking Skull” and “Witches Who Ride,” as well as out-of-print tales from the 1890s’ Southern Workman. Arguing for the value of these stories as part of a sophisticated, complex, and heterogeneous cultural heritage, Gates and Tatar show how these stories deserve a place alongside the classic works of African American literature and American literature more broadly.

This panel considers volunteerism as sponsored by ethnic and service organizations. Both essays challenge our notions of “belonging” in a civil society, including our understandings of assimilation, activism, and protest. Shin’s paper is “Masons, Scouts, and Legionnaires: Voluntary Associations and the Making of Chinese American Civil Society, 1864-1945.” Staysniak’s essay is “Poverty Warriors, Service Learners, and a Nationwide Movement: Youth Volunteer Service, 1964-1973.”

Public Program, Author TalkRevolution Song30 November 2017.Thursday, 6:00PM - 7:00PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm.Russell Shorto, New York Times Magazine$10 registration fee per person. (No Charge for MHS Members or Fellows)

With America’s founding principles being debated today as never before, Shorto looks back to the era in which those principles were forged. Drawing on new sources, he weaves the lives of six people into a seamless narrative that casts fresh light on the range of experience in colonial America on the cusp of revolution. While some of the protagonists play major roles, others struggle no less valiantly. Through these lives we understand that the Revolution was, indeed, fought over the meaning of individual freedom.

Who decides what should be remembered in public spaces? Is removing a monument the equivalent of erasing history, or should monuments change along with their communities? Join MHS in exploring how monuments and memorials can help students understand history, historical memory, and how national symbols play a critical role in articulating culture and identity. We will discuss examples of monuments and memorials ranging from early American history to the Holocaust, and will engage with the current controversy over the role of Confederate monuments and memorials in communities across the US.

This program is open to all K-12 educators. Teachers can earn 22.5 PDPs or one graduate credit (for an additional fee).

In this presentation and virtual exhibit, Professor Andrew Robichaud and students from Boston University will present more than twenty rare artifacts and documents from the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society. From prison and asylum reform, to education and temperance, to women’s rights and abolitionism, this presentation will explore many dimensions of reform in Boston. How did Boston reformers understand their changing world, and how did they understand social change and improvement?

Early American History SeminarPetitions and the Cry of Sedition5 December 2017.Tuesday, 5:15PM - 7:30PMAdrian C. Weimer, Providence CollegeComment: Walter Woodward, University of Connecticut

In the political upheavals of the early Restoration a remarkable number of Massachusetts men and women expressed keen dissatisfaction with the monarchy or General Court, leading to trials over seditious speech. The rich theological language in the petitions and feisty curses in the trial records offer an unrivaled glimpse into the significance of religion for the mobilization of local political communities in this tumultuous era.

Brown BagConstructing the Ocean’s Edge: Toward an Environmental History of the Atlantic World6 December 2017.Wednesday, 12:00PM - 1:00PMChris Pastore, State University of New York at Albany

This presentation examines the environmental history and cultural geography of the North Atlantic shore during the Age of Exploration. How, it asks, did early modern coastal imaginaries shape the contours of cultural contact and exchange among Native Americans and Europeans? And how did those imaginaries shape the ways both groups interacted with coastal spaces in more material ways? A closer look at the ways coasts blurred the bounds of natural knowledge, conventions of conduct, and even the distinction between good and evil, may help us write uncertainty into an otherwise linear narrative of human progress, and, by extension, global expansion.

Member Event, Special EventMHS Fellows and Members Holiday Party6 December 2017.Wednesday, 6:00PM - 8:00PMThis event is open only to MHS Fellows and Members

MHS Fellows and Members are invited to the Society’s annual holiday party. Enjoy an evening of holiday cheer, celebrate the season, and wish a happy retirement to MHS President Emeritus Dennis Fiori. Holiday cocktail attire requested. RSVP by 1 December.

MHS TourThe History and Collections of the MHS9 December 2017.Saturday, 10:00AM - 11:30AM

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

When Pennsylvania settlers used plants to treat illnesses, they used a type of knowledge that Anderson calls “lived botany.” This term reveals that colonists developed ways of interpreting their landscapes that simultaneously partook of and deviated from the norms of eighteenth-century natural history. Domestic spaces became sites where colonists created information about the natural world, allowing them to feel secure in the new environments where they claimed dominion.

Public Program, Author TalkThe Slave's Cause13 December 2017.Wednesday, 6:00PM - 7:00PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm.Manisha Sinha, University of Connecticut

Abolitionists are often portrayed as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. This book broadens the chronology of abolition beyond the antebellum period as well as recasts it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism to anti-imperialism. This new history sets the abolition movement in a transnational context and illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave’s cause to the struggle to redefine democracy and human rights across the globe.

MHS TourThe History and Collections of the MHS16 December 2017.Saturday, 10:00AM - 11:30AM

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

History of Women and Gender SeminarMiss America’s Politics: Beauty and the Development of the New Right since 196819 December 2017.Tuesday, 5:30PM - 7:45PMLocation: Massachusetts Historical SocietyMicki McElya, University of ConnecticutComment: Genevieve A. Clutario, Harvard University

Drawn from McElya’s larger book project, this essay examines the centrality of the Miss America pageant, its local networks, and individual contestants to the rise of activist conservative women and the New Right in the 1960s and 1970s. It analyzes the celebration, power, and political effects of normative beauty, steeped in heterosexual gender norms and white supremacy, and argues for the transformative effect of putting diverse women’s voices at the center of political history and inquiry.

MHS TourThe History and Collections of the MHS30 December 2017.Saturday, 10:00AM - 11:30AM

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

Brown BagExcavating the Western Indian Mound and Building the American Archive3 January 2018.Wednesday, 12:00PM - 1:00PMDerek O'Leary, University of California, Berkeley

Settlers and travelers moving westward in the early republic encountered the myriad Indian mounds scattered along the American frontier. These sundry earthworks furnished ample grist for various projects: frontier infrastructure, literary nationalism, the national historical narrative, and—as this talk explores—the emergence of American archives.

Due to the severe weather forecast, the MHS is CLOSED on Thursday, 4 January. If you plan to visit the building on Friday, 5 January, please check our website that morning to see if the building is open.

MHS TourThe History and Collections of the MHS13 January 2018.Saturday, 10:00AM - 11:30AM

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

Environmental History SeminarThe Fight before the Flood: Rural Protest and the Debate over Boston’s Quabbin Reservoir, 1919-192716 January 2018.Tuesday, 5:15PM - 7:30PMJeffrey Egan, University of ConnecticutComment: Karl Haglund, Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation

In 1919, state engineers proposed solving Boston’s water supply crisis by damming the Swift River, flooding a western Massachusetts valley and evicting 2,500 people. The contentious six-year debate that followed does not fit the standard story of urban conservationists versus rural peoples, as many valley residents defined themselves as rural and conservationist, and thus offers scholars a chance to see fresh nuances in early twentieth-century land management, rural life, and urban development.

"Come, then, one and all, and learn to know yourselves." With these words, a traveling phrenologist advertised his lecture to the public. Proponents of phrenology — a controversial, influential science — believed that the shape of one’s cranium revealed one’s character. This talk explores the world of phrenological lecture-demonstrations and the circulation of materialist ideas about the self.

Public Program, Author TalkPauline Maier Memorial Lecture - Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention17 January 2018.Wednesday, 6:00PM - 7:30PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm.Mary Sarah Bilder, Boston College Law School$10 registration fee per person. (No Charge for MHS Members or Fellows)

James Madison’s Notes on the 1787 Constitutional Convention have acquired nearly unquestioned authority as the description of the U.S. Constitution’s creation. No document provides a more complete record of the deliberations in Philadelphia. But how reliable is this account? In an unprecedented investigation Mary Sarah Bilder reveals that Madison revised the Notes to a far greater extent than previously recognized. Madison’s Hand offers a biography of a document that, over two centuries, developed a life and character all its own.

MHS TourThe History and Collections of the MHS20 January 2018.Saturday, 10:00AM - 11:30AM

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

History of Women and Gender SeminarThe "Woman Inventor" as a Political Tool of Female Suffragists: Patents, Invention, and Civil Rights in the 19th-Century United States23 January 2018.Tuesday, 5:30PM - 7:45PMLocation: Massachusetts Historical SocietyKara Swanson, Northeastern University School of LawComment: Rebecca Herzig, Bates College

After the Patent Act of 1790, patents played an important social and political role in the formation of American nationhood and citizenship. Part of a larger book project, this paper demonstrates how nineteenth-century American women mobilized patents granted to women as justification for civil rights claims. It identifies the creation of the “woman inventor” as a cultural trope and political weapon of resistance.

Public Program, ConversationPeter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize Award & Reception25 January 2018.Thursday, 6:00PM - 7:30PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30.Tamara Plakins Thornton, University at Buffalo, and Catherine Allgor, MHS

Watch the recording of this event, embedded below:

Please join us for a special evening in which Tamara Plakins Thornton will receive the 2017 Gomes Prize for Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a 19th-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life. Thornton will join MHS President and Dolley Madison biographer Catherine Allgor in a conversation about why historians become biographers. How do they pull off that transformation? Thornton and Allgor will explore what drew them to the life of a single individual after they had published “standard” historical monographs. They will address the sorts of novel challenges they faced as both scholars and writers— and the new intellectual pleasures they encountered.

MHS TourThe History and Collections of the MHS27 January 2018.Saturday, 10:00AM - 11:30AM

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Yankees in the West.

Public Program, ConversationAesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film29 January 2018.Monday, 6:00PM - 7:30PMThere will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm.Martha McNamara, Wellesley College, and Karan Sheldon, Northeast Historic Film$10 per person fee (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members or EBT cardholders).

The term “amateur film” conjures visions of shaky, out-of-focus images depicting family vacations and kids’ birthday parties, but early twentieth-century amateur filmmaking produced irreplaceable records of people’s lives and beloved places. This volume of essays, interprets a wide variety of visually expressive amateur films made in New England. Martha McNamara and Karan Sheldon will highlight three examples: the comedies of landscape architect Sidney N. Shurcliff, depictions of pastoral family life by Elizabeth Woodman Wright, and the chronicles of Anna B. Harris, an African American resident of Manchester, Vermont.

Between Prohibition and World War II, American law enforcement went from being seen as a brutal and incompetent political liability to a professional crime-fighting regime. This essay explores the dramatic shift in public perception by studying the changing practices of Depression-era morality policing in Boston and Los Angeles—specifically, the police enforcement of morals misdemeanors, including vagrancy, disorderly conduct, lewdness, and prostitution, which disproportionately targeted poor women on city streets.

This project focuses on women who worked as Indian doctresses and the clients who sought their care. The study strives to more fully integrate indigeneity into fields of study from which it is often absent, most notably labor history and the history of medicine.